Reading and "Mental Pause"

This is our second year of using Sonlight for school. The kids all like the books - yeah! Unfortunately, I now have four kids reading a minimum of 2 books each a week. My original plan was to read along with the kids.

That plan flew out the window almost immediately. The teen was reading Scarlet Letter. I kept up for the first two days - then fell behind. I tried to convince him to give me a few days for catch up, and he agreed - but even with that help I couldn't keep up. So, Scarlet Letter was abandoned.

I can usually keep up with reading for the smiling child, but am currently two days behind. My plan is to catch up today. What do they say about the best laid plans?

The books for the middle child and the teen are all hard enough that I really need to have my own copy. The teen and I tried to share a book once and it always worked out that he was actually reading the book at the very moment that I had time to read. So I decided that whenever there is a book with chapters that take me more than ten minutes or so to read, I would just get my own copy.

This is a great plan - we have Half Price bookstores all around us. Since the books are almost always classics, they are generally easy to find. I say "generally" because some of the books have proven impossible to find used. For those books, I order them new and acknowledge that I won't even try to read them.

So there I was, trying to read along with my kids (I don't read the novels aloud because there is always someone who feels the need to either talk or sing or play guitar whenever I start reading), and I was somehow unable to finish my reading.

I finally discovered that my biggest problem is that there is NEVER a quiet moment in my house! I really mean never. Either someone is talking, asking questions, practicing music, or in the case of the princess, just jabbering and singing. I find myself re-reading the same sentence over and over and still not remembering what I read.

You'd think that I'd just start reading at night, but nooooo! It's not quiet then either.

So here I sit, trying to make it through the reading with the smiling child. Luckily (?) I don't have copies of the books the middle child is reading. I've admitted to the teen that, although I really wanted to read My Antonia with him, I just won't be able to do it. Thank goodness that the princess's books are simple. That I can handle. Let me tell you about "Pat the Rat."

Good News:

1. I got an "award" for finishing my socks on Ravelry.

2. The middle child was playing something that sounded so much like Stairway to Heaven, that I have him listening to the opening so he can have something new to play!!